


it's rotten work

by QuickSilverFox3



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Background Relationships, Established Relationship, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, M/M, Nonbinary My Unit | Byleth, Past Torture, Trans Felix Hugo Fraldarius, Whump
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-25
Updated: 2021-01-25
Packaged: 2021-03-17 22:33:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,268
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28981917
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/QuickSilverFox3/pseuds/QuickSilverFox3
Summary: Felix is exhausted, but Sylvain needs his help.Sylvain is trying to keep his promise to Felix, but he doesn't know if he will.
Relationships: Felix Hugo Fraldarius/Sylvain Jose Gautier, Marianne von Edmund & Felix Hugo Fraldarius
Comments: 1
Kudos: 9
Collections: Chocolate Box - Round 6





	it's rotten work

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Serie11](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Serie11/gifts).



> Written for Serie11 for Chocolate Box Round 6 2021.   
> I hope you like it <3

Felix didn’t know how much longer he would last. Exhaustion had settled over his shoulders like a blanket, then had dug its claws into his very bones, threatening to drag him down into the sticking, grasping mud. His fingers were numb, wrapped around his sword handle with the determination of a dying man, clinging to his last vestige of hope. The rain poured down like knives, biting at his face, his hair plastered to his skin and diluting the coppery tang of his blood in his mouth.

A distant roar and Felix twisted, arm turned to stone and yet he raised his blade, unable to do anything else. He felt the blow as if it was a thousand miles away, shaking through someone else’s arm, but the blood that fell against his face as his other sword slid through his attacker’s throat, was as warm as the summer sun. The man sagged against him, a momentary dead weight before he slid free, and was forgotten. 

All he could do is take another step, then another, and hope that it wouldn’t be his last. 

It had meant to be a routine mission, as routine as anything could be these days, and Felix felt his lips curl upwards into a grin, the action tearing the barely healed split open anew. Life at the academy had grown a lot more interesting ever since the new teacher—slightly older than himself and yet, ageless at the same time—arrived. 

Felix could remember their introduction to the assembled classes clearly. The quiet no-nonsense way they interrupted the Bishop to correct her on their pronouns was a sharp contrast to Felix’s first fumbling attempts as a child. Glenn’s hand on his shoulder—a support Felix was fiercely grateful for even as he fought to the urge to hide—couldn’t completely do away with the cold twist of fear in his gut as he stared up at his father with his new name hanging in the silent air. 

So when Byleth had stopped by their classroom with the suggestion of a joint mission, Felix had spared a moment to glance towards Sylvain, before shrugging and nodding. A gaggle of other students had been trailing behind them like a troop of lost ducklings, faces peeking around the edge of the doorway when the Professor stepped inside to speak to Manuela

He regretted that choice the moment the bandit reinforcements slipped from the hidden alcoves in the hills. They were like blood from a wound, swelling their ranks until they crashed onto the students like the sea, splitting them up, separating them until they were lost when the heavens opened. The world turned grey. 

Sylvain had kissed Felix just before the battle, hidden from the others by the bulk of the towering chestnut horse Byleth had indicated for him before they left. This was still new to them both, a previously unspoken thing recently given a voice that had grown in the spaces between them, through every nervous glance and unspoken sentence, both skirting around the edges of it for so long. 

In the driving rain, with the edge of his anger so clear in his chest, Felix clung to the memory of that kiss. The sensation of Sylvain’s fingers twisting through his hair, warm and solid beneath his hands to try and combat the waves of exhaustion. They had turned to each other as the bandits advanced, moments before they would be separated, and Sylvain had used that moment to tuck his Vulnernary into Felix’s pouch, pressing calloused fingers to the livid cut in his forearm—a lucky strike. Sometimes luck was all an enemy needed. 

The empty bottle rattled in Felix’s pouch, like a heartbeat.

“Felix!”

Marianne’s face was paler than usual, her shout of relief trailing off at the edges as he turned to her, sword reflexively raised. 

“What’s happening?” he growled, too tired to modulate his tone. He could almost hear Ingrid scolding him for it in the recesses of his mind. 

“I can’t heal you,” she blurted out, sliding from the back of her Pegasus—the ribbons in its mane hanging limp and splattered with mud. Felix reflexively held up his hands to help her. The flowery scent that followed her, faint beneath the oppressive iron tang of blood and death, reminded him somehow of Ingrid. He shook his head, trying to pull his thoughts away from that distraction. 

“Why? What’s happened?” Her hands trembled slightly in Felix’s, and she let go to reach blindly behind her, pressing a hand to the horse’s neck. 

Marianne pulled in a deep breath. “Sylvain needs help. Can you fly?”

Felix hated flying, the sudden transition between land and sky making his stomach drop and bile rise in his throat. But for Sylvain, he would rip the sun down from the heavens. 

“I can manage. Can she—” Felix jerked his chin towards the horse, eyeing the animal with the same level of apprehension she looked at him, “—take us both?”

Marianne nodded, keeping her hands still. Felix sighed, sheathing his sword before crouching to give Marianne a boost back onto the horse—her cheeks turned pink, but she nodded her thanks shakily—and he scrambled up behind her.

“Um, hold on. We’re going to have to fly fast to avoid the archers.”

Felix bit back on the shudder, unused to being so close to another person still, and carefully placed his hands on Marianne’s hips, feeling her tense under his grip. “Go.”

⁂

For all his casual brushes with danger at the hands of spurned lovers or their older siblings, Sylvian had always thought that this is how he would die: beaten and bloody in the dirt, surrounded by uncaring faces as he choked on his blood. He still tried to rise, pain lancing through his ribs, fingers sinking into the freezing mud before a boot came down again, knocking him back into the dirt. 

“—undamaged enough for the ransom?”

It took a few moments—a few agonisingly long moments where all Sylvain could focus on was the frantic rattling of his breath in his chest, the world trembling as he shook—for the words to make sense. They settled in the base of his skull like a noose tightening around his neck, and he looked up into the main bandit’s face. The man was strangely familiar in the same way the events of a dream were familiar, foggy and uncertain but with a dawning surety just out of reach. 

“Couldn’t get enough of me the first time round?” Sylvain slurred, spitting out a mouthful of blood and feeling it run down his chin to grin at the man, all teeth and a promise of death in his eyes if he could only stand. “Had to try and kidnap me again?”

The slap was expected, hard enough to leave a ringing in his ears and set his cheek on fire, the skin pulsing in the shape of the handprint. Sylvain rolled his head back to the side, seeing the spark of fury in his kidnapper’s eyes. The years hadn’t been kind to him in the years since Sylvain’s last kidnapping: bones pressed against his skin, visible through the gaps in his previously well-fitting armour. But he couldn’t afford a moment of sympathy. 

The last time he had been kidnapped by this group, it was for his Crest. It was  _ always _ for his Crest. He would still wake up in the dead of night with the memory of his screams ringing in his head. Hands pressed to the looping scars over his ribs they had made—uncaring when he tried to get away, too young to understand what was happening, too weak to do any damage when he beat his fists against their chests—as they searched for something they could never find. 

Sylvain had been a child, still learning how to wield a lance, hands still soft and uncalloused. 

He wasn’t a child any longer. 

Reason magic could burn you from the inside out if you let it. Felix’s hands were already starting to bear the telltale black scars, twisting down the edges of his fingertips like vines, with a brace growing at the nape of his neck and coiling into his hair. Sylvain’s scars were—as best they could tell with Professor Manuela’s and Hanneman’s ceaseless bickering—internal for now: a growing patchwork of darkness that ran through his bones and muscle. 

“You made one big mistake trying this again,” Sylvain said, pressing his hands into the mud once more, feeling the tell-tale burn in his fingers, in his chest. 

“Yeah?” The man sniggered, stepping forward and towering over Sylvain, temporarily blotting out the sun. “What’s that?”

“Should have brought more men,” Sylvain grinned, and cast, as his screams of pain mingled with theirs as they were torn apart. 

He released the pain with a gasp, the noise thick and wet, as he pitched forward into the mud, unable to remain upright for a second longer. The world around him was muffled, even the steady impact of the rain against his freezing skin felt muted rather than the tide that threatened to wash him away. Sylvain pulled in a gasping breath, tasting the coil of iron across his tongue and the grit of the mud. He had given his last Vulnernary to Felix, and he didn’t regret that. How could he?

Felix always looked so serious. He had done so ever since they were children. It made the moments of softness—the moments where his scowl would smooth away, replaced by a look of such warm contentment, Sylvain thought he would melt for the love that blossomed in his chest—all the more precious to him. He treasured every hidden smile, the brush of Felix’s fingertips against his, every kiss. 

“‘M sorry,” Sylvain whispered, feeling unconscious pull at his mind to the sound of wingbeats, a distant shout echoing somewhere far away from him. It looked like he wouldn’t be able to keep his promise after all. 

⁂

“Good morning.”

Sylvain flinched reflexively as he woke, a heavy weight seeming to press him into the bed beneath him, pain crackling through his chest. He half-opened an eye and saw the now-familiar sight of the infirmary ceiling, carefully whitewashed but still bearing the imprint of a thousand whispered prayers. Carefully glancing to the side, he caught Professor Byleth’s gaze. 

Their face was as blank as ever, seemingly brought into motion by his gaze upon them. It would have been unsettling if Sylvain had the energy to care, their gaze seeming to stare straight through him without ever landing on him. 

“How are you feeling?” They asked, hands folded in their lap, head tilted to one side. 

“Hurts,” Sylvain ground out from behind gritted teeth. 

Byleth nodded, the motion off in a way he couldn’t describe, almost like watching a marionette move. “You’re still healing. That is to be expected.” They rose, the chair creaking long after they had completed the motion. “Manuela will be in to see you in an hour. I would suggest that Felix makes his way back into his bed by then.”

Their footsteps continued to echo long after they made their way out of the room, but Sylvain didn’t care. 

With some difficulty—every slight movement taking an eternity as he braced himself for fresh pain—Sylvain turned his head as much as he was able and saw the cause of the weight on his side. 

Felix lay across his arm, Sylvain’s hand resting beneath his loose hair that spread over the side of the bed like spilt ink, asleep and breathing steadily. He could just feel the faint exhalations against the bare skin of his arm, the rest of him seemingly covered in thick bandages. 

“Felix?” Sylvain croaked, reaching across with his other hand to trail careful fingers over the crease in Felix’s brow, the softness of his cheek. Felix shifted, eyes flickering open, dark like liquid night and it stole Sylvain’s breath away. “I’m sorry.”

The words seemed to hang in the quiet air, and Sylvain held his breath, waiting for Felix’s response. 

Felix breathed out slowly, turning his head, so his chin rested against Sylvain’s wrist, hair curling at the edges like something out of a painting. “I know. I’m sorry too.”

Felix’s nose crinkled as he spoke, the words uncertain though not from a lack of belief, instead of a lack of practice. Sylvain grinned, warmth blossoming in his chest, and moved to kiss Felix, helpless in the moment to do anything else. 

“Stop that,” Felix snapped, breaking apart to press his hands to Sylvain’s shoulders, nudging him to lie flat on the bed. “You’re hurt.”

“And? I’ll get better.”

“That’s not the point.” Felix’s voice cracked, rough with sleep and worry. Sylvain sank back onto the bed, momentarily mute, as he took in the tinge of red around the rims of Felix’s eyes, the bruise of purple beneath them and, most importantly, the new growth of the thick black scars that coiled around his wrists like bracers. 

“Are you going to take care of me?” Sylvain said with a wink, seeking more familiar territory.

“Yes.”

“ _ Oh. _ ”

The flush was high on Felix’s cheeks, and he couldn’t meet Sylvain’s gaze fully. Sylvain knew he was staring at Felix as if the other boy had hung the moon and stars, his face likely as red as his hair, but he didn’t care. He reached for him, pulling Felix down into another kiss, tasting the faint remnants of salt on his lips, and knowing there was nowhere else he would rather be.


End file.
